Can I Get A Skeleton?

Now that the grand and inevitable wave of frothing, unbridled human enthusiasm has stampeded Mitt Romney to the Republican nomination, parading him through outreached, ecstatic hands to the crown of the Capitoline Hill, where he will be girded with laurels before probably being murdered by the Praetorian Guard in favor of an Illyrian dirt-worshipper who promised them good land in Pannonia to retire on. The Roman metaphor was a mistake, I'm seeing that now. Everything I know about it I saw on HBO. Which I know the Romneys have never seen. It's all paganism and fucking over there.

Before the first fly hand landed on the beached political corpse of the ruddy and baleen Gingrich, the mixed media onslaught from Team Romney had already begun, assuring us that, despite anything we may have heard, Barack Obama has failed at everything on every level that he has attempted, considered, conceived of, assented to, consented to, was consulted on, signed, acknowledged or heard of.

If you're wondering what kind of nuanced, delicate rapier fencing we can expect over the next seven months, to wit:

Romney told the Chantilly audience that people ask him how he would handle the economy differently than Obama. "I say, 'Well, look at what the president has done, and do the opposite,'" he said to applause.

Maybe "to wit" wasn't the right word choice. Months and months of this, which is funny for about 2.5 minutes, but considering a 24-hour news cycle even more amplified than it was the last go-round with twitter and tumblr and facebook and everything else achieving a full-masted thrust of social penetration, I have to spend a few minutes considering if it's philosophically consistent to be simultaneously a Luddite and use a sensory-deprivation chamber.

It seems amazingly tedious and here I am annoyed and turned off three weeks before Memorial Day, but look, this is what we get for electing a pro-terrorist Kenyan socialist Muslim/atheist. We're fools for not seeing it coming.

Now on top of everything else, Obama has to deal with the EXPLOSIVE! news of the release of STEAMY! excerpts from his college girlfriend's diary!

Right away, as trumpeted in every headline, the word "sexual" appears right there in the story! About the president! I turned 18 in 1992. The Clinton years were formative for me, in more ways than one.  I know where this is going...

“The SEXUAL! warmth is definitely there – but the rest of it has sharp edges and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all,”Cook wrote in her journal on Feb. 25, 1984. “I have to admit that I am feeling anger at him for some reason, multi-stranded reasons. His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness – and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.”

And just like that, I turn the lights back up to full illumination, click off the Al Green music and go back to typing with two hands. Clinton this is not. This isn't even Hillary Clinton. At least with her I can pretend she's scissor sisters with Condi Rice or something. So maybe Obama shrugs this potential scandal off.

I did find something incredibly damning in one of his letters though, printed in part by Vanity Fair:

Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak.

Go ahead, read it again. Let it land. Yep, that's right: Barack Obama is fucking boring. This is the man at 22 years old. Writing to a woman he may want to bang again. I agree with him on just about every point of policy, and that concurrence grows to nearly 100% when considered against the Romney option as a voter variable, but... man, I don't know. This is our Barry spitting game? He can't mix in a "baby"? Like "The only viable way to illuminate the anti-fascist themes of Orwell's 1984 is an intertextual reading against Silverstein's The Giving Tree, pussycat. Also, I dig the way your rack looks in that sweater."

Come on. We already know Romney is Squaresville. He's a Mormon. Caffeine qualifies as a dangerous controlled substance. Yes, most people who run for president are boring. Anyone with that much of an overdeveloped sense of ambition has to be. And again, considered in this dyad, there's no question which candidate's got the least arboreal stick up his ass. But I like to imagine the guy I'm voting for would pull the stick out every once in a while if only to shove something else up there for a few minutes. You know, just to try it out.